I want to preface this post with a bold disclaimer that I am not a scientist. I have been compared to an absent mined professor, but I am not a professor either.

But I was thinking about the idea of electric cars and the problems they face. The big one us of course electricity. How to store enough of it to make the car useful without having batteries so big that the car is useless.

Volvo has a concept that includes a  small gas engine that runs a generator that powers up the batteries as you go thus extending the range of the car.

Thinking in my simplistic non-scientist's way, I thought why can't the car do more to generate its own power?

A generator is simply a magnet spinning inside a coil of wires. Cars already have a number of parts that spin. What if you made the drive shaft magnetic and housed it in a coil? The shaft is there and it's already spinning why not use it and return some additional power to the batteries?

Or let's say you have an electric motor in the front driving the front wheels. The back wheels are still spinning. They have to or you're not going anywhere. Why not attach a magnetic shaft to the hub and have it spin inside a coil generating power as you go?

I'm sure there are reasons this can't be done. Probably something to do with not being able to break the laws of physics that escapes me. Because it just seems like common sense to me that if you've got spinny bits already, you should use that motion to generate more power.

If none of those ideas are practical what about wind power? What if you put a turbine in a hood scoop and connected it to a generator. The faster you drove, the more power you could return to the batteries. If you got lucky and found a parking space facing the wind, you could be charging the batteries while you work or shop.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 07:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment